Truth and Beauty

Peter Henry Emerson's Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads

February 13–April 23, 2000

Peter Henry Emerson

Marshman Going to Cut Schoof-Stuff

1886
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

British photographer Peter Henry Emerson was trained as a medical doctor but was drawn to photography by a desire to capture the truth. In his most important book, Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886), Emerson not only documented rural life in East Anglia but succeeded in making some of the most beautiful photographs of rural life and landscape in the nineteenth century. The fifteen platinum prints in this exhibition were from the collections of the Parnassus Foundation and Jane and Raphael Bernstein.